How deadly storms claim a bigger toll

By Adam Sobel, Special to CNN

Updated 0224 GMT (1024 HKT) November 11, 2013

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Photos: Typhoon Haiyan – A man reconstructs his house in the bay of Tacloban, Leyte province, Philippines, on Wednesday, November 27, 2013. Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms on record, hit the country's eastern seaboard on November 8, leaving a wide swath of destruction, including more than 5,000 deaths.

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Photos: Typhoon Haiyan – A man rests on his damaged house along the shore in Tacloban on Monday, November 25.

Typhoon Haiyan – Local people begin to help clear debris near the shoreline where several tankers ran aground on November 23 in Leyte. The death toll from the storm stands at more than 5,000, according to a government-run news agency.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man clears debris from in front of his home near the shoreline on November 23 in Leyte.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Groups of men clear debris near the shoreline on November 23 in Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors of Typhoon Haiyan inspect the damage to their houses in Tacloban, Philippines, on Friday, November 22.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Filpinos clear rubble from a hard-hit area in Tacloban on November 22.

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Typhoon Haiyan – An airplane lands in Tacloban as Antonio Lacasa rebuilds his house on Thursday, November 21.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People carry a coffin through an opening in the wall of a public cemetery for burial in Tacloban on November 21.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A member of the Philippine air force drops relief goods for survivors in Tolosa on November 21.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Children blow bubbles in a destroyed market in Tacloban on Wednesday, November 20.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Workers clear mud and debris in Tacloban on November 20.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A boy climbs across debris in Tacloban on November 20.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People at the airport in Tacloban react to a blast of wind from an aircraft on November 20.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man walks through water in the typhoon-ravaged city of Tacloban, Philippines, on November 20.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man sleeps on Tuesday, November 19, on a tanker that ran aground during Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Firemen unload bodies November 19 for forensic experts to register and bury in a mass grave outside of Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Firemen unload more victims outside of Tacloban on November 19.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man fans the flames of a fire in Tanauan, Philippines, on November 19.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors salvage wood next to stranded ships in Tacloban on November 19.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Philippine military personnel carry an injured survivor to an evacuation flight at the Tacloban airport November 19.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People in Tacloban march in the rain November 19 during a procession calling for courage and resilience among survivors.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People play cards by candlelight Monday, November 18, in Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A U.S. Navy helicopter delivers relief goods to typhoon victims in Ormoc, Philippines, on November 18.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Men take food back to their families in Leyte on November 18. Countries all over the world have pledged relief aid to those affected by the typhoon, but damage to airports and roads have made moving the aid very difficult.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People are held back as the U.S. Navy delivers aid from a helicopter in San Jose, Philippines, on November 18.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A helicopter flies over a call for help in Ormoc on November 18.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man cleans up mud inside a church in the hard-hit city of Tacloban on November 18.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A boy bathes November 18 at a Tacloban school turned into a temporary shelter.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Hundreds of typhoon survivors are packed into a U.S. military airplane November 18 for evacuation from Tacloban's airport.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Typhoon survivors run toward a passing U.S. Navy helicopter in San Jose on November 18.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A boy holding a toy machine gun sits Sunday, November 17, on a ship that ran aground in Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People gather around a helicopter as it delivers relief supplies November 17 in Guiuan, Philippines.

Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors clean mannequins found among the debris in Tacloban on November 17.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man leans against a statue of the Crucifixion before a Mass at Santo Nino Church in Tacloban on November 17.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man carries a piece of wood from the debris in Tacloban on November 17.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors wait in line in Tacloban for relief goods on November 17.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man looks over the devastation from his damaged home in Tacloban on November 17.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A trapped resident braves the dust created by a U.S. Navy helicopter taking off Saturday, November 16, on Manicani Island, Philippines.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Corpses are collected and loaded on trucks to be taken to mass graves in Tacloban on November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A victim's corpse floats on a river in Tanauan on November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A pregnant survivor waits to give birth in a hospital November 16 in Tanauan.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A dead dog lies in front of a house destroyed by the typhoon in Tanauan.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man carries a bicycle as he walks through the ruins of a Tacloban building November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors of the typhoon stand in a Tanauan street partially blocked by debris November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – An elderly survivor walks past toppled cars outside a church in Tacloban on November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man in Tanauan cleans meat after slaughtering his only cow that survived the typhoon.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors gather in Tacloban to await transport to a neighboring province on November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Men carry a coffin toward a Leyte cemetery on November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A survivor cooks dinner in front of his damaged home in Marabut, Philippines, on Friday, November 15.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Toppled coconut trees dot a mountain in an area devastated by the typhoon in Leyte province.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A typhoon survivor keeps her husband alive by manually pumping air into his lungs after his leg was amputated at a Tacloban hospital November 15. The hospital has been operating without power since the typhoon.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A survivor reacts to the damage at a residential area in Tacloban on November 15.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Typhoon victims are treated in the lobby of a Tacloban hospital on November 15.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Philippine Army soldiers carry the body of a civilian in Tanauan on November 15.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Residents wait to board a Singaporean cargo plane at the Tacloban airport on November 15. Many survivors have converged on the city's airport to wait for flights.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Search and retrieval teams carry a body bag in Tacloban on November 15.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Haiyan survivors carry food that a U.S. military helicopter dropped off in Guiuan on Thursday, November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Dozens of bodies are placed near Tacloban City Hall on November 14 as workers prepare a mass grave on the outskirts of the hard-hit city.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A girl plays inside her house amid the devastation in Tacloban on November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A Filipino soldier hands out bread to survivors in Maraboth, Philippines, on November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A boy takes cover from rain while waiting for an evacuation flight from Tacloban's airport November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Workers arrange bodies at a mass burial site at a Tacloban cemetery November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – The weary wait for evacuation from Tacloban on November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A truck lies in the water in Hernani, Philippines, on November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Children play with fallen power lines near a damaged school in Guiuan on November 14.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Teresa Mazeda hangs laundry in the ruins of her Tacloban home on Wednesday, November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Nina Duran searches for belongings at her family's destroyed house in Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors walk through the ruins of their neighborhood outside Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man sits in front of his destroyed business November 13 in Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A family, desperate to charge their mobile phones to search for family and friends, tries to use a ceiling fan to generate electricity November 13 in the Philippine province of Cebu.

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Typhoon Haiyan – An injured man in Tacloban rests beneath a picture of Jesus Christ on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man takes a shower amid the rubble in Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A rescue team wades into Tacloban floodwater to retrieve a body on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Residents take shelter in a Tacloban church on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Residents make their way through a destroyed neighborhood in Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A boy cycles past a coffin left on a street in Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man looks at his destroyed home November 13 in Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Body bags are lined up in Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors prepare to board a military plane November 13 at the Tacloban airport.

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Photos: Typhoon Haiyan – Men walk through smoke as they burn debris from a Tacloban church on November 16.

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Typhoon Haiyan – An aerial view of Tanuan shows signs pleading for help and food November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Soldiers help a woman after she collapsed November 13 while waiting in line to board a military plane at Tacloban's airport.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors wait to be evacuated from Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – An injured survivor gets carried on a stretcher before being airlifted from Tacloban's airport November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A survivor begins to rebuild his house in Tacloban on November 13.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Evacuees wait to board a military aircraft in Leyte on Tuesday, November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People walk through damage in Tacloban on November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A young man waits at the airport November 12 in hopes of being evacuated from Tacloban.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A woman comforts a crying relative as a plane leaves the Tacloban airport November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A man sits crying on a packed aircraft in Tacloban on November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Debris lays scattered around a damaged home near the Tacloban airport on November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A girl sits inside a bus as she waits for a ferry in Matnog, Philippines, on November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Police line up bodies for processing in Tacloban on November 12.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People in Tacloban pass debris on November 11.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Survivors in Tacloban board a military plane bound for the Philippine capital of Manila on November 11.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Residents carry bags of rice from a Tacloban warehouse that they stormed November 11 because of a food shortage.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A woman in Tacloban walks amid the debris of destroyed houses on November 11.

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Typhoon Haiyan – People make their way across a flooded street in Shangsi, China, on November 11. Haiyan moved toward Vietnam and south China after devastating the Philippines.

Typhoon Haiyan – A woman carries a baby across a river November 8 at a coastal village in Las Pinas, Philippines.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A resident walks along a fishing village in Bacoor, Philippines, on November 8.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A house in Legazpi, Philippines, is engulfed by storm surge November 8.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A child wraps himself in a blanket inside a makeshift house along a Bacoor fishing village.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A woman and her children head for an evacuation center November 8 amid strong winds in Cebu City, Philippines.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Huge waves from Haiyan hit the shoreline in Legazpi on November 8.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A fisherman lifts a post to reinforce his home at a coastal village in Las Pinas on November 8.

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Typhoon Haiyan – A resident unloads nets off a fishing boat in Bacoor on November 8.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Residents reinforce their homes in Las Pinas on November 8.

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Typhoon Haiyan – The storm approaches the Philippines in this satellite image taken Thursday, November 7, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Workers bring down a billboard in Makati, Philippines, on November 7 before Haiyan makes landfall.

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Typhoon Haiyan – Philippine Coast Guard personnel stand in formation beside newly acquired rubber boats after a blessing ceremony in Manila on Wednesday, November 6. The boats were to be deployed to the central Philippines in preparation for Haiyan.

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Story highlights

Typhoon caused devastating damage to parts of the Philippines

Higher temperatures are likely to increase power of severe storms, says Adam Sobel

Greater population living along the shore leads to bigger toll when storms strike, he says

Sobel: Higher sea level, a consequence of warming, magnifies flooding

Two days ago, an intensely powerful typhoon ripped through the midsection of the Philippines. Internationally known as Haiyan, the weakened but still dangerous storm has plowed into Vietnam. But history will record this as a Filipino disaster. I will call the typhoon by its Filipino name, Yolanda.

Yolanda might have been the most powerful land-falling tropical cyclone -- this being the generic scientific term as they are called typhoons, hurricanes or simply cyclones in different parts of the world -- ever recorded by meteorologists. More analysis will be needed to finalize that ruling. But it really doesn't matter now to the millions of people in the rubble of Yolanda's wake.

The strongest winds, in the narrow ring of Yolanda's perfectly circular eyewall, passed directly through Tacloban city, a provincial capital with more than 200,000 inhabitants. Photos coming from Tacloban show almost complete devastation.

An accurate death toll will take time, but it is nearly impossible to imagine that it won't be in the thousands. Numbers of more than 10,000, as in some early estimates, seem possible. Many, perhaps most, were not killed by the winds but were drowned by deep storm surges.

Adam Sobel

Yolanda may have broken records, and its direct hit on a major city was excruciatingly bad luck. But tropical cyclone death tolls in the thousands or higher are not nearly rare enough in the developing world.

In 2008, Cyclone Nargis likely killed more than 100,000 in Myanmar. And the Philippines, right in the world's worst cyclone highway, are hit very often. In December, Typhoon Bopha, nearly as strong as Yolanda, hit the southern island of Mindanao and killed more than a thousand.

Does it seem, in fact, that these weather disasters are happening more often? Well, they are.

The damage caused by tropical cyclones has risen dramatically in the past century everywhere it has been assessed. But essentially all of that is attributable to development of vulnerable coastlines, rather than changes in the storms themselves.

The population of the Philippines, rich in vulnerable coastlines, has roughly doubled in the past 30 years. There as elsewhere, more people are simply exposed to danger.

In the U.S., dollar losses from our hurricanes have exploded. Large numbers of American casualties, though, have become rare, despite big increases in the numbers of potential victims along the coasts. (Katrina in 2005 was the exception that proves that rule.) Better forecasts, warnings and evacuation procedures, as well as tougher building codes and other infrastructure measures, have achieved that.

Improvements are starting to take hold in the developing world as well. When Cyclone Phailin hit India's west coast last month, there was reason to fear a repeat of the 1999 cyclone that hit nearby Orissa, killing 10,000.

Instead, good advance warning and evacuations (with help from a storm weaker than some anticipated) kept Phailin's casualty count low. In the Philippines, many hundreds of thousands were reported to have been evacuated ahead of Yolanda. As awful as the death toll will surely be, it could just as surely have been much higher.

But are population growth, development and emergency management the whole story? Or is this disaster also related to global warming?

Well, it is.

Climate scientists expect that tropical cyclones should become more powerful as the climate warms. There may or may not be more of them; there may well be fewer. But the chance of getting one as strong as Yolanda -- the very worst kind -- may well be increasing.

Global warming may already, in fact, have contributed to Yolanda's power. We can't see that in the data; the numbers and intensities of tropical cyclones naturally fluctuate too much from year to year for us to clearly identify a rising trend underneath that would show warming's influence with certainty.

But that doesn't mean it's not there. If the time comes that we can detect the warming signal in cyclone activity well enough to make definitive statements, it will be because the storms have intensified to a frightening degree -- and irreversibly so, for all practical purposes.

Sea level rise is a much more certain consequence of warming, already easily detectable. That alone will make flooding -- likely Yolanda's deadliest weapon -- a more severe consequence of storms as the sea starts higher before the surge.

Today, as the Philippines reels from Yolanda, climate is not the main story.

Our thoughts should be with the survivors and those rushing in to help them. The way to save people and property from tropical cyclones, in the near and medium-term, is to get them out of harm's way -- in the days before landfall to the extent that's possible; and, even better, by not putting them there in the first place. But the changes we are making to the climate are not likely to help.